Rajinder Singh Bediਰਜਿੰਦਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਬੇਦੀ

Early life

Rajinder Singh Bedi was born on 1 September 1915 in Sialkot, in the Punjab of British India — a city that now lies in Pakistan. He was the son of Hira Singh, the postmaster of the Sadar Bazar post office in Lahore, and Sewa Dei. His schooling began in Lahore Cantonment and continued at the SBBS Khalsa School in Lahore, where he passed his matriculation in the first division in 1931. He then entered DAV College, Lahore, but the death of his mother, a tuberculosis patient, cut his studies short: in 1933 he left college and joined the postal department, following his father into the post office. Bedi had started writing while still at school. Poems and fiction in English and Urdu appeared in university magazines and local newspapers, and he wrote for radio even while working as a post-office clerk. In 1934, at the age of nineteen, he married.

The Urdu writer

Bedi’s literary career began in 1932. He wrote his earliest poems and stories under the pen name Mohsin Lahori; his first story, ‘Dukh Sukh’, appeared in the Punjabi magazine Sarang. He went on to become one of the leading lights of the Progressive Writers’ Movement and is counted among the architects of contemporary Urdu fiction, alongside figures such as Munshi Premchand and Saadat Hasan Manto. His first story collection, Dana-o-Dam, appeared in the late 1930s; Grahan (1942) was hailed as a landmark in the Urdu short story, and Kokh Jalli followed in 1949. Stories such as ‘Garam Coat’, ‘Lajwanti’, ‘Apne Dukh Mujhe De Do’ and ‘Rahman ke Joote’ dissect human relationships with grim precision, exposing social inequities through the lives of ordinary men and women. Bedi’s writing blends hard realism with metaphor and a strange spiritualism, and he is especially remembered for his disturbing tales of Partition. His plays include Saat Khel and Be-Jaan Cheezen. For Ek Chadar Maili Si he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for Urdu in 1965; he was honoured with the Padma Shri in 1972 and the Ghalib Award for Urdu drama in 1978.

Hindi cinema

After Partition, Bedi left Lahore, spent brief spells in Ropar and Shimla and a stint as director of the Jammu radio station, and then moved to Bombay, where producer D. D. Kashyap hired him as a writer. Over the next four decades he wrote dialogue, screenplays and stories for more than forty Hindi films. His credits include Badi Bahen (1949), Daag (1952), Mirza Ghalib (1954), the Bimal Roy classic Devdas (1955), Garam Coat (1955, which he also produced), Madhumati (1958), Anuradha (1960), Anupama (1966), Satyakam (1969) and Abhimaan (1973). He wrote his film scripts in Urdu, as several of Bombay’s finest screenwriters did. He won the Filmfare Award for Best Dialogue for Madhumati (1959) and again for Satyakam (1971), and had earlier taken the Filmfare Best Story award for Garam Coat. As a director he is known for Dastak (1970), expanded from his own radio play, which won a National Award — Rehana Sultan won Best Actress — and for Phagun (1973).

Later years and legacy

Bedi’s personal life was marked by loss. His son Narender Singh Bedi, a film producer and director, died in 1982, and his wife Satwant Kaur died soon after. Bedi suffered a stroke in 1982 and was later diagnosed with cancer; he died on 11 November 1984 in Mumbai. Condolence messages arrived from across the border — General Zia-ul Haq, then President of Pakistan, said his death was a loss to Pakistan as well as India — and a crossing at King’s Circle in Bombay was later named Rajinder Singh Bedi Chowk. In his memory the Punjab government instituted the Rajinder Singh Bedi Award for Urdu literature. His novella Ek Chadar Maili Si was filmed in Pakistan as Mutthi Bhar Chawal (1978) and in India under its own title in 1986, a rare honour for any writer’s story.